Clinical Criteria for the Diagnosis of Salivary Gland Hypofunction

There is considerable difficulty in the making of initial clinical decisions as to whether a given patient has salivary gland hypofunction, and hence requires additional salivary gland evaluation. This study identified a set of four clinical measures that, together, successfully predicted the presence or absence of salivary gland hypofunction. The four measures were: dryness of lips, dryness of buccal mucosa, absence of saliva produced by gland palpation, and total DMFT; they were derived from discriminant analysis of data collected from 71 individuals with normal and low salivary flow rates. These measures are proposed as criteria for clinical decision-making, as well as for classification of patients in studies of salivary gland dysfunction syndromes. This study also identified unstimulated whole salivary flow rates of 0.12-0.16 mL/min as the critical range separating individuals with salivary gland hypofunction from those with normal gland function.